The Seed

Gillian knew her parents wouldn't approve, but she couldn't turn back.

It happened the summer she turned fifteen. There was a big to-do at the MedCenter where her folks worked, and she lucked into a two-week visit with her Uncle Frank. He was not merely the black sheep of the family; to hear her father tell it, he was leading a plot to subdivide the meadow. She knew her dad was being melodramatic, but it only served to heighten her curiosity about Uncle Frank.

She was a city kid. Having grown up in the midst of the vast coastal sprawl called Los Angeles, Gillian knew how to make the best of the free services offered to residents of Mexamerica's regional capital. That included not only transportation and communication, but education as well. School was fine, as far as it went, but to her it felt confining. She got this odd gnawing sensation from time to time, and lately she'd begun to realize that it meant some part of the lesson was being omitted. Usually it was just a simplification that was cleared up later on, but occasionally it was more mysterious. She tracked down the ones she could, and was learning to live with the ones she couldn't. Sometimes they were marked, ?proprietary', at others ?security'. With Uncle Frank, however, it was ?family secret'. And this was her chance to ferret it out.

At the moment, however, she was starting to be a problem for her uncle. Today's expedition had been presented to the kids as a nature walk, but she was more interested in the geology they were walking through than in the plants her uncle was so fascinated by. Gillian could hear her younger cousin rattling off everything she'd been told in school about the changes forced upon the wild world by climate change, but neither Peg nor her uncle were in view. They'd started down into the canyon just past the ridge Gillian was studying, and had paused for the umpteenth time to finger some plant or other. Rocks, to her way of thinking, told better stories than plants. But that was about to change.

"Gil!?" her uncle called.

She ran a finger along one of the strata in an exposed boulder while waiting for the echo to fade. "Be right there," she said.

The crunch of an approaching flurry of footsteps never broke through her intense examination of that rock, because the next thing she knew, her cousin was poking her in the ribs.

"Ow! Stop that, Peg," Gillian protested.

Pegwin straightened. "C'mon, rock hound. There's plenty more of that to look at down below. My dad said there was a slide near here, but when I asked him about the swings, he-."

A sudden crack split the rush of wind through the trees. It was followed closely by the unsettling sound of something being dragged, a hollow thud, and then silence.

The two girls looked at one another, and then ran off towards the sound. An old rotted tree stump had given up its perch atop a rise, slalomed along a gully and jammed itself headfirst into some animal's burrow. They were picking their way towards its severed root when Uncle Frank arrived.

"Sure it's dead, Gil," he said, "but it won't be a fossil for some time. What's your interest in it?"

Gillian studied her uncle for a moment. Frank's resemblance to her mother went beyond the usual comparison of features or build. They both naturally tended towards the lean side, both exuded an air of intensity that at times bordered on the manic, and each was steadfastly rooted to some secret core of certainty that they used to guide their lives. They just used it in different ways, that's all.

"Gil?" he repeated.

Smiling impishly, Gillian pointed towards the broken main root that was now the highest part of the tree. "The rocks it took with it. It dug them out of the ground for me."

He huffed. "Yeah. I should have known. Look, I'll make you a deal. If you tell me the story of the rocks, I'll tell you what this tree says about the environment around here. Deal?"